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Contributors...
Edwin R. Scollon

Diving Lake Champlain...
The Valcour Bay Research Project- V

The
cannon is broken!

The cascabel portion of the exploded cannon is
recovered from Valcour Bay. Photo by the author

In partnership with...

Once
the proper permits were in place, the next order of business was the
further study the cannon.

Since we’ll be discussing cannon
and their parts further, a diagram of a cannon and its nomenclature are
provided below:

Modified
and from an original in:
Manucy, Albert. Artillery Through the Ages: A Short Illustrated
History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America. Washington,
D.C. 1949; National Park Service Division of Publications, rpt. 1985.

Cannon are classified by the
weight of the iron shot that they are capable of firing. A 9-pounder
would fire nine-pound, iron shot. Shot was produced from molds and would
have a consistent diameter. A cannon’s bore would also require a specific
diameter to accommodate its shot and a predetermined gap. This gap was
called windage and would prevent the shot from becoming lodged in the
bore. Since the bores were of a precise diameter, a gun’s size can be
determined from a measurement of its bore.

Our first thoughts were that the
gun might be from a vessel discovered by the Lake Champlain Maritime
Museum in 1997. The gondola was located in deep waters, standing upright
and completely intact. Its bow gun was still present but two guns,
typically located amidships, were missing. If the gun were of those two,
it would most likely be a 9-pounder that the fleet typically mounted
there. (For more information on the discovered gunboat click
here.)

Art Cohn and associate, Jonathon
Eddy, traveled to the site to measure its bore and get a firsthand look at
the site. We were surprised at what the two would discover. Art’s
measurement of the bore was 3 ½” - the bore diameter of a 6-pounder, not
of a nine. Jonathon also reported feeling an irregular, sharp edge beyond
the gun’s trunnion. Their discoveries raised more questions:
What vessel could the gun be from? Could the gun be broken? If it
was, was it stuck by enemy shot or did it explode?

A few days later, I went out to
the site to obtain further measurements of the gun, along with its
position and depth within the sediment. Three volunteer members of the
newly forming project joined me: Tim Aubin, Dan Rock and Dan Carpenter.
We brought out gauged pieces of ½” PVC pipe to measure the sediment
depth. We also brought a clipboard with an attached sheet of Mylar and
pencils to record our measurements.

To measure the total length of
the gun we decided to place one of the PVC gauges at its muzzle, one at
its cascabel and measure the distance between. Terry Aubin and I had
previously excavated to one of the trunnions. I estimated where the
cascabel should be from the excavation and pushed the second gauge into
the silt. Several feet of the gauge disappeared without hitting anything
solid. I brought it back, closer to the excavation, and tried again.
This process continued until I finally made contact with the gun. The
gauge was only a short distance from the excavation and both gauges were
only 4 ½’ apart.

I followed the gauge to the gun
and traced its outline. Jonathon was right; there was a sharp edge. The
gun was broken at a steep angle, between its trunnions. The other
trunnion and the remainder of the gun were missing. Earlier I had made a
sketch of a cannon on the sheet of Mylar. I drew a line across it to
indicate where it was broken and showed it to the group.

I remember my heart sinking as I
first felt the break. I had already envisioned the raising of the gun and
a discarded fragment wasn’t what I had in mind. Eventually, my
disappointment would vanish as we learned more about the gun and its
surroundings. We would later discover that the gun did explode. That
event would provide us with a means to identify the gun later on, as
you’ll see in the pages that follow.

I had always been in awe of the
men’s courage to stand before an enemy’s guns. As I researched and found
several historical accounts of cannons bursting, I also found myself in
awe of their courage to stand behind the guns of their own:

An
exploding cannon killed Scottish King James II, while he supervised the
siege of Roxburgh Castle in 1460. A fragment severed his leg.

In 1862 an experimental
cannon exploded in Savannah, Georgia; one of the fragments flew over
General Robert E. Lee’s head. The fragment was recently recovered from
the Wilmington River. Check it out
here.

Lt. James Hadden, traveling down Lake George with
Burgoyne's right flank (the supply train) wrote of exploded cannons on
gunboats in his Journal:

"...the Rebels with the Gun Boats and Batteaux which they had surprised at
the carrying Place at Lake George, attacked in two Divisions, Diamond
Island, where Captain Auberry and a Detachment of the 47th Regiment were
posted with some Cannon and Gun Boats: the Rebels were repulsed with great
Loss, and pursued by the Gun Boats to the East Shore, where the principal
Vessel and a Gun Boat were retaken, together with all the Cannon,
except two which had burst; the Enemy, having had time to set
fire to the other Batteaux, retreated over the Mountains."
--Sept. 24, 1777 1

Bostonian
Timothy Newell, also recorded two incidents in his journal during the
British occupation in 1775 2:

"August 19th– A 42-pounder
split on the lines, killed a bombardier and wounded one or two men."

"October 17th– Two floating
batteries from the Provincials from Cambridge River fired a number of
cannon into the camp at the Common; the shot went thro houses by the Lamb
Tavern, etc. A deserter who came in this morning says one of the cannon
split and killed and wounded several. 5 or 6 hats, a waistcoat and part
of a boat came on shore at
the bottom of the Common."

Top,
side and bottom views of the Valcour cannon are in the draft below. The
draft is from the LCMM archives, was drafted by Gordon Cawood and inked by
Adam Loven.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
Artifacts on the bottom of the lake are the
property of the People of the States of New York and/or Vermont by law. It
is illegal to remove or damage them under State Law(s) without the
appropriate clearances and permits. Removing them and transferring them
across state lines violates Federal law & makes one liable to Federal
prosecution.

2 Timothy Newell. “The Journal of Timothy Newell.” In The Spirit of Seventy-Six:
The Story of the American Revolution As
Told by the Participants. Eds. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B.
Morris. Indianapolis, 1958; rpt. New York, NY,: Da Capo Press, 1995.

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